THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: ABU GHRAIB

THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: ABU GHRAIB; Prison Chief Defends Using M.P.'s to Help Interrogators

By DEXTER FILKINS; Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

Published: May 9, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 8—
The head of Abu Ghraib prison on Saturday defended his strategy to have prison guards help prepare detainees for interrogation, a recommendation he made just before the worst abuses of prisoners occurred.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the chief of interrogations and detentions in Iraq, said a series of recommendations he made after a tour of the prison last summer had played no role in the later abuse and humiliation of prisoners by American guards.

''The guidance and recommendations provided by that team and the one that I made were absolutely correct,'' he said Saturday at a news conference in Baghdad. He added that the ideas were in ''keeping with how America does its operations.''

General Miller and a team of experts visited the prison in August and September, at a time when the prison population was expanding and the guerrilla insurgency was intensifying. Military officials were frustrated by the lack of information about the insurgents.

One of General Miller's recommendations was that the American military police, serving as guards at Abu Ghraib, become ''actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees,'' according to an internal investigation by an Army major general.

Two months after General Miller made his recommendations, some of the guards at the prison began systematically abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees. Some guards have said they had been asked by intelligence officers to rough up the prisoners to help along the interrogations.

An internal Army report into the abuses left unanswered whether General Miller's recommendation about the prison guards had been officially adopted, but it said the guards had begun to prepare prisoners for interrogations.

The report, by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, criticized General Miller's recommendations, saying that allowing guards to ''set the conditions'' for the interrogations would ''clearly run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility.''

General Miller, who took over Abu Ghraib a month ago, appeared before reporters on Saturday after a week in which American commanders here were bombarded with questions about the events that led to the abuse of the Iraqi detainees, and about the series of photographs that have been shown around the world.

''The recommendations that the team and I made was about how you could improve the interrogation process and the development and collection of intelligence,'' General Miller said. ''Those recommendations that were made were based on the system that provided humane detention and excellent interrogation.''

''I stand by those recommendations, and many of those are in process of being implemented today,'' he said.

General Miller, who at the time of his prison tour was in charge of the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said he had never recommended that the guards at Abu Ghraib be involved in actual questioning of prisoners. But he said there was much they could do to help the interrogators, by observing the detainees, studying their behavior, and watching their daily habits.

He called the practice ''passive intelligence collection.''

''That means that they observe the detainees on a 24-hour-a-day basis,'' he said. ''They are there in the cell blocks, they are there in the areas, and they understand what in the detainees life is ongoing, who they spoke with, whatever information may occur, what their mental attitude was.''

General Miller had also recommended that the two principle functions at Abu Ghraib, detention and interrogation, be integrated under a single command. Some weeks later, American commanders appointed a military intelligence officer to take command of Abu Ghraib, placing him in charge of the military police.

A senior Defense Department official said Saturday that the Pentagon last year approved a series of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at the prison at Guantánamo Bay. But the official said he was not aware that interrogators had ever actually employed the tactics, or that similar techniques had ever been authorized for use at prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib.

The official said the classified list of approved techniques included disrupting prisoners' sleep routines and requiring them to disrobe entirely for questioning, but not to be paraded through a cellblock, as some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said Saturday night that ''Interrogation techniques are tightly controlled, they're limited in duration and scope, and used infrequently. They must be approved on a case-by-case basis.''

The harsher techniques, which were first reported in the Sunday issue of The Washington Post, required approval in advance by senior Defense Department officials and, if deemed necessary, the presence of medical personnel, the official said.

Some military police officers who served as guards at Abu Ghraib said they had been encouraged by members of the military intelligence brigade to rough up Iraqi detainees before they were interrogated.

In an interview earlier this week, General Miller said he had never recommended that military intelligence take over Abu Ghraib.

''The recommendation was that someone, one organization, be in charge of the operations at Abu Ghraib,'' he said. ''We did not make the recommendation on exactly who it would be.''

The deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, told a House hearing on Friday that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, signed a directive in November putting the military police at Abu Ghraib under intelligence officers.

General Miller suggested that while his recommendations were sound, they might have been carried out improperly.

''What I can tell you with absolute certainty is that those recommendations were explained in a very detailed manner,'' he said. ''Their implementation was a command authority, and how it was done -- obviously they made different decisions from that.''

President Bush spoke of the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in his weekly radio address, broadcast Saturday, promising a ''thorough review'' of all prison operations to ensure that similar ''disgraceful incidents'' would not occur again.

''Such practices do not reflect our values,'' he said. ''They are a stain on our country's honor and reputation.''

He blamed a ''small number'' of American servicemen and women for the abuse.

''This has been a difficult few weeks,'' Mr. Bush said. ''We will learn all the facts and determine the full extent of these abuses. Those involved will be identified; they will answer for their actions.''